"for a self returning mostly memory" (2025) - Digital renderings, 35 mm film slides, Kodak Carousel, audio cassette loop (5 min), wood, wallpaper, found objects
“for a self returning mostly memory” is an intermedia installation centered around slides of digital 3D renderings, created from advertising images from American hotels and restaurants. In these new digital environment, the camera shifts to explore new perspectives and probe the outer limits of the photographic space. Occluded parts of the still photograph translate into black digital void, spaces become fragmented and alien.
Analog film, with its associations to optical, indexical truth, becomes a nebulous host for these cameraless digital simulacra, an unreliable narrator (re)presenting spaces that never were. The slide sequence is projected on a theater flat wall depicting a run-down East Hollywood style mid-century apartment, and accompanied by a looping remix of Johnny Ace’s debut single “My Song” from 1952, with the vocals digitally erased.
Commissioned for the exhibition “Mary Shelley Must Never Die” at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm, an exploration of the Gothic in contemporary Swedish art. “for a self returning mostly memory” leans into tradition of Los Angeles Gothic and the dark underside of conspicuous luxury and La La Land artifice, but also proposes a media-technological gothic; here, images float like ghosts between old and new technologies, time is disjointed, and the veracity of information a is always an open question.
“Mary Shelley Must Never Die” curated by Ashik Zaman. Thanks to Jesper Edvinsson, Anders af Klintberg and the staff at Konstnärshuset. Photos by Giulia Cairone and Henrik Söderström.